The Missing Middle: Farming Trees for Conservation and Profit

Soils For Life

Farmer, forester or conservationist. It might seem like you need to choose one but more and more landholders are challenging this. With the right management, trees on farms can provide better farm productivity and forest products and increase biodiversity. But in many ways forests are still treated as either conservation reserves or plantations, making it difficult for farmers to take this path.

In less than 100 years as a nation we have gone from removing trees to wanting to plant them back. Tree planting programs are not achieving the scale of restoration required to repair Australia's landscapes. We need to rethink how we support landholders to invest in trees.

In this episode we hear from two farm foresters who have approached farming trees very differently, as well as a scientist and a forest policy professor. They discuss why more farmers have not adopted forestry, how trees can be managed for multiple outcomes and what mindset and policy shifts are required to move to a whole-of-landscape approach.

Thank you to our guests:

Farm forester and grazier - James Henderson https://soilsforlife.org.au/colodan/

Forest scientist and grazier - Rowan Reid https://www.agroforestry.net.au/

Professor Peter Kanowski - https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/kanowski-pj

Associate Professor Cris Brack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-brack-233a117a/

Your hosts Eli Court @soilsforlife and Susannah Kable @growloveproject produced by Edgars Greste